"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. "

It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.

I was always perturbed by the shift from calling them "social networks" to "social media". It signalled a friends-to-famous shift (plus ads) that I didn't particularly want.

Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.)

They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)

I myself started making the same distinction when I talk about these things in English, except it's "social media" vs "social networks". Though I have no idea how to make that distinction in Russian, social "media" never caught on as a term there.

An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.

This might be controversial. Please disagree with me.

When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.

So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.

Sure, the modern Twitter/X feed is not like the original reverse chronological timeline but the latter is still available right next to it. Maybe it's the power of the default but I find the algorithmic feed much better.

The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok.

The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.

Unrelated to the topic described in the blog itself, I overall like the theme of `susam.net`. The name itself reminded me of a sesame seed in Turkish for a while. (I think author had recently mentioned one of the recent posts that they wanted to get susam.com but that was already taken by a Turkish company selling some spices...)

The content (that shows up in HN) is also good. Since I am on mobile device, I cannot tell the exact font used, but seems like Georgia to me. While https://github.com/susam/susam.net hosts the actual source code of the website.

Another remark: Would be really nice to have a same theme adaptation for BearBlog and similar places.

IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time.

To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks

Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails.

What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.

Any other platforms like Mastodon which are doing things well - are you guys on lemmy?

I still think it's worth reflecting which of the toxic patterns we want to, or don't want to reproduce on non-commercial networks like mastodon. Infinite scroll, quote reply, the like button... all these aren't neutral, and discussions were rightly heated about introducing them.

Why won’t their stock crash and burn already???

This reminded me of this video from a more optimistic time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

The title of the article is arguing semantics. Like it or not, the term “social media” is what we use to describe scroll apps like TikTok.

The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else.

I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.